Fiction by Jessamine Chan
At the beginning of this story, Frida Liu makes a terrible decision under extreme stress and leaves her one-year-old daughter Harriet alone at home for a few hours. We all know this is a bad thing to do, but what mother hasn't thought of just walking away from her extra-fussy baby after night after night of no sleep?
The situation is complicated by the fact that Frida was abandoned by her husband since just after Harriet was born (he "just fell in love" with someone else, who happened to be younger than Frida and child-free) and she's been required to go back to work well before she was ready, taking a lower-paying job to get "flexible" hours so that she can take care of Harriet. Any mother can understand why Frida was having so much trouble.
But Frida gets caught, and there are dire consequences for bad mothers in this book.
I literally could not keep reading this book because I was so upset by it. I could identify so strongly with Frida, and I was so angry at how the husband and mistress could get to be the good guys, that I had to stop reading before the story even got to the titular School.
It's a testament to the skill of this author that the characters were so compelling I could not bear to see them suffer, but I wouldn't really recommend this book for enjoyable reading.
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